I’m here at the Inbound Marketing Summit in lovely Foxborough, MA (yup, the home of the New England Patriots). This is the fifth occurrence of the event and second time in the Boston area. I am proud to say that I’ve attended four out of the five and this is by far the best attended out of the five. The focus of the event is on harnessing the power of things like social marketing, media and search engine optimization.

My original intention was to blog several of the panels but as you can see, it’s nearly 3:00 PM ET and this is my first one. Oh well, that’s what happens when you run into a group of about 100 people that you haven’t seen in a while and you need to do some catching up. Fortunately, I saved the cream of the crop for you and I’m kicking this off with a friend and super smart guy, CC Chapman.

CC’s talk is on “buckets” or more importantly, the importance of not putting people into buckets (he used an example of him being announced as a “daddy blogger” — arguably, it’s something he does but it’s not what he wants to be categorized as. Too many times today, he sees people getting put in buckets, especially as they become well known for a particular facet of their social prowess (podcasting, daddy/mommy blogging, photography skills, etc.) This is interesting because another good friend, Melanie Notkin, founder and principal of SavvyAuntie.com, has shared similar frustrations when she’s been billed as “a blogger.”

In both cases, neither CC nor Melanie were trying to distance themselves from the world of blogging, but rather for being pigeonholed into one particular category. This is particular important when you think about pitching a blogger, reporter or podcaster.

p.s. the reason I chose this photo is that I had a burger with CC at 5 Brothers today lunch. I couldn’t resist.